Designed by: Donald X. Vaccarino
The ‘building’ in Kingdom Builder starts the moment you open the box. The board is formed by slotting together four randomly-chosen boards from the eight available; each is a landscape of small hexes, and features one or two spaces with a unique building type. Players then choose three score cards from the deck of nine; these dictate how points are scored at the end of the game. These cards might give points for occupying horizontal lines, or vertical lines (or both!) so you’ll end up with a unique playing board, four rule-bending building types, and three different ways to score. Phew!
Thankfully, the gameplay itself is simple – there are five different types of hexes: desert, canyon, grassland, meadow and forest, interspersed with impassable mountains and rivers. Each turn, a player plays three ‘settlements’ (little wooden houses) on to the board, hoping to fulfil as many of the scoring criteria as possible. Where these can be placed is determined by a card drawn at random, featuring one of the five hex types. So if the card you picked has desert on it, your three settlements have to go on desert hexes. The other important but easy-to-overlook requirement is that you must, if possible, place your settlements adjacent to others of your own. This adjacency rule is key – if you’re not currently adjacent to any desert hexes (in the above example) you are free to place your pieces on any desert spaces on the board.
When your settlement touches a special building hex, you get to take one of the two tiles on it, and use the special power for every subsequent turn. The power might allow you to place a fourth piece, or to move an existing piece on to a river space (remembering the adjacency rule). These powers are crucial to maximising your score, and there are only two tiles available on each building hex, so the early game is often a race to snaffle them up. Once one player has placed all forty settlements, the game is over, and each player’s score is tallied for all three score cards to find the winner.
Kingdom Builder is essentially abstract, but the dynamic nature of the set-up means that each game plays quite differently, and it’s short enough to play a few games back to back. It looks pretty too, and the several expansions available take the gameplay in interesting new directions.
The only direct interaction between players is blocking on the board, a little like Ticket to Ride. It's an essential tactic if you're playing to win, but can be avoided if you prefer a more casual family style.
Each turn, you simply place three pieces and activate your special tiles - the work of a few seconds. However, the order in which you do this can be important, so during the latter half of the game turns can slow down, but not to a painful degree.
Kingdom Builder is undeniably a game where optimising your point-scoring potential on each turn will win you the game. But the calculations involved are simple and spacial for the most part - and figuring out how to populate one of each line on the board (for example) is a pleasing puzzle. Oh and a special mention for the 'adjacency rule' - a moment to learn, a lifetime to remember.
You will have gathered that Kingdom Builder has practically infinite replayability - you won't ever play the same game twice. But on a separate note, it's a game where the subtlety of tactics could take a few games to get to grips with. Your first turn can be critical - if you place your pieces in such a way that they are touching all five types of hex, the rest of your game is going to be largely dictated to you - so worth playing until everyone's mastered this.
2-4
Players
10+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
A clever game - or almost you could say games plural, as in each set-up the rules for what scores you points are pulled randomly from the deck. For personal tastes it's a bit abstract but many gamers love it for its variety and accessibility - a game that doesn't require a huge effort to pick up and play. Neat.